Abstract

Over the last decade, Italian university students have come to encounter English increasingly outside formal instruction, through a broad and fast-changing media ecology that includes traditional and digital formats, platforms and everyday communicative practices. This introduction frames the monographic issue Informal Pathways to English Learning within the national PRIN project on media-driven informalisation of English learning in Italy, which first established a large-scale baseline by pairing the IECoL questionnaire on informal contact with English and a receptive vocabulary test. Building on that map of behaviours and correlates, the present issue pursues a second, more fine-grained stage of inquiry by asking what kinds of English are acquired informally, under which conditions and with what limits. Across contributions, learning outcomes are investigated through targeted designs that combine general and domain-specific vocabulary tests (often inspired by Vocabulary Size Test formats), reaction-time measures, corpus-based analyses of learner production and, in one case, longitudinal follow-up. The studies cover socio-political lexis, sports and cooking terminology, false friends, slang and pragmatic features such as vague language. Overall, they show that informal learning effects are substantial but uneven across domains, strongly mediated by proficiency and shaped by the quality and relevance of engagement, with clear implications for how instruction can build strategically on students’ extramural practices.

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